IFOA 2011: Barclay, Ghosh, Huston, Jessup

Reading: Linwood Barclay, Amitav Ghosh, Nancy Huston, Heather Jessup

International Festival of Authors (Fleck Dance Theatre). Tuesday, October 25, 2011.

It's funny that I consider it a matter of course that I'd go to a show to check out bands that I knew next to nothing about — hell, even go in with a deliberate lack of foreknowledge just to be able to evaluate with a sort of beginner's mind — but it seems rather strange to me to do the same at the Authors' Festival. But still, I had a free night and reckoned to check something out, and settled on this reading at the Fleck Theatre. Of the four listed authors, David Bezmozgis, who I'd seen a couple days previously, was the only one I'd heard of.

At IFOA events, there's usually a few hints as to what sort of audience is anticipated. I'm always paying attention to the music that gets played before things get going, and here, there was a worryingly dull mix of adult contemporary soft rock that looked to fit what was a slightly older crowd. At least there was a Belle & Sebastian song in there.

More encouragingly, the night was hosted by Zoe Whittall, whose work, in books like Holding Still for as Long as Possible, takes place in a slightly cooler version of Toronto that remains pretty culturally recognizable to me — anyone who sees the romance in using the sidewalk in front of Soundscapes' window display as a makeout spot would understand where I'm coming from.

But when Whittall stated that Linwood Barclay would be reading first, I did a double take, and was quickly digging out my programme. No one else around me seemed to be taken by surprise by this.¹ I was never a particular fan of Barclay's brand of joshin' satire when he was a columnist at The Star, and except for a stray mention here or there, hadn't been following his literary career, where he has apparently made good as an author of suburban anxiety crime fiction. He alluded to his Star days his extended intro, managing to fit in a few topical jokes, and taking care to slip in a mention how well his previous book had done.

He was reading here from his recently-released The Accident, presenting the book's prologue, a snippet — disconnected from the main narrative — telling the story of a pair of small-town friends on vacation in New York City. The whole thing felt like a slightly-too-calculated skewering of middlebrow naïveté pitched squarely at middlebrow readers to give them a sense of cultural superiority — there was even a character named Edna. It was goes-down-smooth stuff, and there was nothing wrong with it, but my general impression was that this was not for me.

He was followed up by Amitav Ghosh. Born in Calcutta (though writing in English), Ghosh has written several novels as well as a variety of non-fiction works. He was reading from River of Smoke, the middle book of an in-progress trilogy following upon the Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. The book is mostly set in Canton just before the first Opium War, though the passage he read came from a slightly earlier timeframe, set against the backdrop of a sea voyage passing by Saint Helena while Napolean was there in exile.

With even a short snippet giving a nice sense of place and the feeling of the gears of several cultures turning against each other, this was interesting stuff. As well, Ghosh was undoubtedly the most compelling reader of the night, the lilt of his voice enfolding the story's faraway exoticism. This was good stuff and served the purpose of putting me on the lookout for more by Ghosh.

Nancy Huston's reading was also, broadly speaking, a travelogue. Giving an account of a vacation going badly, Infrared is a "slice of life" of its main character, sexomaniac Rena Greenblatt. Telling the crowd that she had recenly read at a 'books and breakfasts' event, she commented, "it's actually not a breakfast kind of book... it should be more like 'novels and nightcaps'."

Giving a warning that the reading was not suited for those under eighteen, she read a series of loosely-connected episodes, and was even brave enough to include a passage with a panted sex scene — although one gets the impression that any section of the book would have something like that. Several bodily fluids made an appearance, but also some more lofty "philosophical fencing". With the narrative crosscutting into flashback and memories, there was an air of sophistication here, and a slightly dislocating feeling — one that served the vibe well — that might arise from the fact that Huston writes and publishes in French (her second language), and then subsequently translates herself into her native English. I could see the craft at play here, but I didn't really get the impression that this would be something I'd pick up.

Huston's sophisticated self-assurance was a contrast to Heather Jessup, reading from her first novel The Lightning Field with a paced deliberation that might have been a cover for some nervousness. Set in Cold War-era Toronto with its engineer protagonist working on the Avro Arrow, the extract played on the historical synchronicity that the Arrow's 1957 grand unveiling to the public was upstaged in the news by the launch of Sputnik. In the novel, this is the backdrop to the more personal story of what happens to a family when someone is quite literally struck by lightning.

Some of the aerodynamic jargon felt a little shoehorned in — perhaps the goal was to capture the clipped dryness of the grey flannel suit era, but it left the whole thing feeling a little lacklustre. Jessup is also a published poet, and there was a sense here of carefully-chinked-in words, each considered just so, but sometimes the paragraphs seemed to cohere less. Which means that while there's several potentially-captivating layers here, I wasn't particularly pulled in to the story's world.

And so — four unfamiliar authors, one potential spark. Not a bad ratio, I suppose. Still, as the MOR tunes faded back in as the audience filtered out, I was feeling mostly ambivalent about the night. The format of the straight-ahead reading is, frankly, probably my least-favourite sort of presentation on offer at the festival. The real benefit of seeing authors in the flesh is to get a measure of their personality and a sense of how that's shaped their work, and while that's always going to creep around the edges of their comportment, I'm probably more interested in any sort of dialogue than just a reading.

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¹ It turned out that IFOA's website reflected this actual lineup, but the printed programme — and the electronic version of it that I'd been using to make my picks — were left in error.